Willa CatherBorn in Virginia in 1873, moved to Nebraska at age 9,where she completed her primary schooling and later attended the University of Nebraska (in 1891). After graduating from university, at 23 she became a teacher in Pittsburgh, then moved to New York and assumed the role of editor for McClure's magazine. The entire time she was writing. At 23 she taught in Pittsburg and later became an editor in New York City. Cather's stories create a mythology of the American Childhood with the use of such places and items as the white picket fence or the free open prairie; she uses things that create a dreamy-like depiction of childhood. Her stories are set in the wild, life-liberating frontier, away from the city. Being a drama & music critic and a highly-cultured woman, Cather made a drastic departure by portraying places that were often perceived as dreary low life rural places, such as the backwater immigrant communities of Nebraska. Cather sought to bring the "muse" or shed light on these rural areas. She felt the open prairies were a blank page, a new start to create one's self, and the people there were something to look at. The frontier was a place to disappear. Wrote My Antonia in 1918, at age 45 -- reflected the American dream of farming romanticism, Rockwellian ideal -- described an existence liberated by the frontier. Cather invented herself in college by breaking away from the norm and taking on an "unusual" personality. She was more risky in her presentation and sought to be different than others. While most girls wore long conservative dresses, Cather adorned herself in shorter, more-revealing attire. When that wasn't pushing the boundaries far enough, she began to dress as a boy, which proved shocking for the time. Cather was also very athletic (she rode horses and went hiking up until she was about forty), which contradicted the traditional elegant-passive role of women. But as she established herself as a well-known writer, Cather made a major shift. She lost the tomboyish appearance and adopted a more womanly style. Instead of using her physical appearance to communicate her personality, Cather started using her writing as a vehicle to define her and make her beliefs known. She made her mark of distinction through her writing. As quite a strong woman, she had the writer's power to recast the universe in any image she chose -- Her writing came to define her, so she didn't need to exhibit her individuality through clothes. Cather regarded football as a Homeric sport; a gallant battle Cather saw the prairie as a huge place where people could become nothing -- a blank page, an opportunity to create the life they wanted -- a place to disappear. It encompasses the idea of sod busting, or creating something out of nothing. While the tale seems to follow a linear progression, in reality it is circular, as it both starts and ends in Black Hawk near the train station. The entire story has a sense of making things off the backs of others (off of oppression), but the ability of people to break this mold a find self success; such a theme is accentuated by Blind D'Arnault, the piano player, as a reminder of American Mythology, how America has secrets and how people arrived at success on the sweat of others.ÊD'Arnault created his own dream against all odds -- people have the ability to create the West. There is also a sense that all real artists are barbaric and sensual, doing things against the society. Written during WWI, My Antonia reflects Cather's own autobiography. While she was writing the book, her friend married someone, her mother became ill, and she was forced to take care of 8 kids. The story portrays the sense that childhood is the best time of a person's life, but it is fleeting. [Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost] She abandoned cultural expectaions to write about back-water Nebraska -- In a sense, she brought the muse to Nebraska, which was a blank page waiting for attention. Cather was like Mark Twain in that her stories include colloquial language, the stories of average people, tales within tales [ = Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales?] This was a development into modernist literature. The story proves to be complex. It is narrated by Jim Burden, who is telling both his own stories and stories of others from a subjective standpoint. The book was one of the first to tell a story through a series of other stories and came before a wave of modernist writers:
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Copyright February 10, 2008 Marie M. Furnary All rights reserved.